She liked him there, with the sun behind him. She’d let him stay.
“I’ve named him Hector,” she said, coaxing the skull from the dirt.
“Who?”
“Him.” She pointed to the hole that would have been his nose.
“That’s a heroic name. Why do you think it’s a he?”
She wasn’t sure if he was asking her or quizzing her. “By the size. We found a part of a female skull yesterday.”
He nodded. “And what did you name her?”
“Clytemnestra.”
“I like it.”
“Thanks. I’m keeping an eye out for the last few bits of her. Her skeleton is almost complete.”
“Oh, so that’s Clytemnestra. I heard about her in the lab.”
Bridget nodded. “The biology guys are excited about her.”
Once almost all the dirt was processed, she gingerly lifted Hector’s skull. She began to brush out the grooves as she’d been taught.
“It doesn’t get to you, does it?”
She shrugged. “Not really.”
“Something will eventually. It seems so far back, I know, but something always gets through.”
“But there isn’t much tragedy in a death that took place three thousand years ago, is there?” Bridget mused aloud. “Old Hector would be long dead no matter what great or awful things happened in his lifetime.”
Peter smiled at her. “It puts mortality in perspective, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Why do we worry so much about everything when we’re just going to end up here?” she asked. She felt quite cheery considering she was standing in a burial site holding a large section of a human skull.
He laughed at her, but he seemed appreciative. He sat down at the edge of the trench to consider. She had the odd perception that he had fine ears. He seemed to hear the full extent of what she said and meant, no matter how loudly or quietly she spoke. When you shared a context, it made hearing easier.
“No question a recent death feels more tragic,” he reasoned. “I guess because we’re still experiencing the world that the dead person is missing. We are still around to miss them.”
Did he have such a tragedy in his life? she wondered. Could he tell that she did?
She pushed her hair back. She realized she’d drawn a streak of dirt across her forehead. “Our moral connection to people expires after a certain amount of time. Don’t you think? Otherwise how could we dig up their graves?”
“You are exactly right, Bridget. I couldn’t agree more. But how long a time? Two hundred years? Two thousand? How do you calculate the moment when a person’s death becomes scientific rather than emotional?”
She knew he was asking the question rhetorically, but she actually wanted to answer it. “I’d say you calculate it by the death of the last person whose life overlapped with theirs. The point when they lose the power to help or hurt a living soul.”
He smiled at her certainty. “That’s your hypothesis?”
“That’s my hypothesis.”
“But don’t you think the power to help or hurt can extend far beyond a person’s natural life?” he asked.
“I don’t,” she proclaimed, almost reflexively. Sometimes she felt the magnet of certainty more than truth.
“Then you, my friend, have a thing or two to learn from the Greeks.”
Lenny,
I enclose the Pants with a little bit of ancient dirt and a picture of me with my new boyfriend, Hector. He’s not so lively, you may say. But he’s got the wisdom of the ages.
A whole lot of love from yer pal Bee (and a toothy kiss from yer pal-in-law, Hector)
Carmen did run lines with Julia. She ran them for hours on end for two straight days. Julia wanted to try a range of parts before she settled on her audition strategy.
Carmen was relieved when Julia went to the office to photocopy more pages so Carmen could at least have a break and check her e-mail. She had a list of unread messages from Bee and Lena and her mom and her step-brother, Paul.
When Julia got back, she immediately noticed a picture Carmen had printed out and left on her desk.
“Hey, who’s this?” Julia asked. She picked up the paper and studied it.
It was a picture of Bee in Turkey holding a human skull and pretending to kiss it. Bee had sent it over the Internet, and it had made Carmen laugh so much she’d printed it out.
“That’s my friend Bridget,” Carmen said.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Carmen knew it was strange of her that she didn’t talk about her friends more to Julia. She mentioned them in passing once in a while, but she never expressed what they really meant to her. She wasn’t sure why. It was as though she had put them and Julia into two different compartments. They didn’t mix. She didn’t want them to mix.
“She’s your friend?” Julia looked vaguely doubtful, like perhaps Carmen had clipped the picture from a magazine and was just pretending.
Maybe that was why, Carmen thought.
“She’s amazing-looking. Check out those legs,” Julia said.
“She’s a jock.”
“She’s pretty. Where does she go to school?”
It was funny. Carmen didn’t think of Bee as pretty, exactly. Bee didn’t have the patience for it. “Brown,” she said.
“I thought about going there. Williams is a lot more intellectual, though.”
This from a girl who read not only Us Weekly each week, but Star and OK! as well. Carmen shrugged.
“Her hair looks kind of fake. She should use a darker shade.”
“What?”
“Does she color it herself?”
“Bridget? She doesn’t color her hair at all. That’s her hair.”
“That’s her real hair?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what she tells you, anyway,” Julia said, half jokingly, but Carmen didn’t find it funny.
She looked at Julia, wondering what was up. Was she honestly competing with a girl she’d never met?
“Hey, let’s go pick up something quick for dinner and bring it back here,” Julia suggested later, after another hour of lines. “I want to keep studying.”
“You can stay here,” Carmen offered. “I’ll go get it.” She was frankly glad to get away from lines, glad to be outside. The grounds of the place were beautiful, especially in the evening light. There were miniature weeping trees along the paths and huge annual gardens around the main buildings.
In her appreciation of the flowers, she lost track of the cafeteria, known by the apprentices as the canteen. She walked until she got to a pretty hillside overlooking the valley. It was lush and so sweet in this light.
Carmen stood there looking at it for a long time. She was already lost—she couldn’t really get more lost, could she? When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere, she mused.
She wondered how long it had been since she’d used her senses to perceive beauty. It was like she had been frozen for all these months and was only now beginning to thaw.
She realized that another person from the campus was nearby, appreciating the same view. It was a woman she had not yet seen or met.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the woman said.
Carmen sighed. “It really is.”
They fell into step together along the path. “Are you part of the theater program?” the woman asked. She was wide hipped and somewhat graceless. She wasn’t an actress, Carmen decided, and felt a sense of camaraderie.
Carmen nodded.
“What are you trying out for?”
Carmen pushed a stray hair behind her ear. “Nothing. I’m doing sets, hopefully.”
“You’re not going to try out for anything?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not an actress.”
“How do you know? Have you tried?”
“I guess not. No.” Though my father c
laims I’m dramatic, she added silently.
“You should try it. It’s really the strength of this program.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“Huh.” Carmen spent two seconds pretending to consider this so she wouldn’t seem rude. “Hey, would you point me in the direction of the canteen? I got off track and I have no idea where I’m going.”
“Sure,” the woman said. She pointed to the left when the path split.
“Thank you,” Carmen said, looking over her shoulder.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Carmen.”
“I’m Judy. Good to meet you, Carmen. You try out, okay?”
Carmen couldn’t say okay if she didn’t mean it. “How ’bout I’ll think about it?”
“That’s all I can ask,” the woman said.
Later, when Carmen was trying to fall asleep and all the lines and lines and lines were scrabbling around in her head, she did think about it. She mainly thought of why she would not do it.
Lena walked around with that overstimulated feeling.
She didn’t like it very much. She forgot to eat and she wore eye makeup to painting class. She forced herself to look at Leo only once every pose and to keep to herself during breaks. She hoped, she silently begged for him to notice her. She racked her brain to find ways to hedge these hopes, to keep them safe.